Before They Ran the Reds Out of the Studios

The screwball comedy The Devil and Miss Jones exemplifies how pro-worker Hollywood was just on the eve of McCarthyism.

Charles Coburn and Jean Arthur appear as a store clerk and undercover boss, respectively, in a scene from the film The Devil and Miss Jones, 1941. (RKO Radio Pictures / Getty Images)

Today, it’s easy to deride conservatives who say that Hollywood is run by “cultural Marxists” looking to poison the youth. But there was a brief period when pro-worker films were the norm and hundreds of talented filmmakers tried to subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) turn mass culture red.

The Devil and Miss Jones, a delightful screwball comedy in this spirit, came out in 1941, several years before the postwar anti-communist witch hunt and blacklist. Its stars are labor organizers trying to unionize a department

store. From the first scenes, unionizing is aligned with a conception of America as a nation based on revolutionary principles and the ideal of democracy. The department store owner, John P. Merrick, who’s also the richest man in the world and the titular “devil,” is furious when he’s reassured by his weaselly lawyers that the union drive is “a simple little disturbance that really has no significance.” He retorts, “The Boston Tea Party was a little disturbance!”

The hero of the unionization drive, Joe O’Brien (Robert Cummings), is fired for his efforts, but he continues to lead the fight from outside. Just before the film’s narrative began, he’d staged a demonstration in front of the store where the owner was hanged in effigy, which “made the front page of the Times, that’s all,” he brags. Merrick, enraged at the bad publicity, is determined to uncover the union drive membership and have everyone involved fired. “Fire anyone that’s even suspicious,” he blusters. “You don’t have to be accurate!”

Merrick is played by Charles Coburn, who’s given one of his best comic roles as a mean, dyspeptic business tycoon living in opulent isolation. Convinced he’s a brilliant titan of industry who earned his wealth on sheer merit, he decides to go undercover as a store employee named Thomas Higgins in the shoe department on the fifth floor (“That’s the hotbed”), so that he can infiltrate and destroy the union drive. “Morons! Sheep! . . . Why, these idiots, I’ll play with them like a cat and mouse,” he gloats.

But once he’s pretending to be a regular employee in his own store, he finds the going rough. No one regards him as brilliant, or even competent. He’s relentlessly belittled by the haughty section manager, who starts off by sneering at his low score on a mandatory intelligence test. But his fellow workers rally around him with support and solidarity. Fellow salesclerk Elizabeth Ellis (Spring Byington), an attractive woman around his own age, says she likes him because “you’re sort of helpless and need someone to look after you.” Clerk Mary Jones (Jean Arthur) coaches him on how to handle fake “store shoppers,” there to spy on salespeople and report on any mistake they make to management. She’s so convinced he’s a penniless senior citizen down on his luck that she insists on giving him fifty cents so he can eat lunch that day.

Keeping a notebook with reminders of changes he’ll make once he casts off his disguise, Merrick writes: “1) Intelligence tests out, 2) Repay Miss Jones 50 cents, and 3) Fire section manager.”

He hates the indignities he continuously suffers as a worker, including what happens when he’s invited by Mary and Elizabeth to the secret union meeting on Mary’s apartment-building rooftop. She and Joe bring him up before the group as “Tom,” a pitiful elderly gentleman who still “has all his faculties” and has worked hard his whole life with nothing to show for it, because of the widespread policy of firing elderly employees once they’ve earned small raises in favor of younger, cheaper workers.

Eventually, the abuses Merrick endures as a salesclerk, plus the warmhearted comradeship offered by his colleagues, win him over. There’s a key scene in which the coworkers become friends during a trip to the beach at Coney Island. Typical of comic representations of “the people” in the 1930s and ’40s, this beach is shown to be noisy, overcrowded, cheerfully crass, and a hell of a lot of fun. The first time we ever see Merrick smile is when he’s watching Joe and Mary comically wrestle and chase each other, clambering over other beachgoers who are so packed together that no sand is visible.

In a follow-up scene, Merrick has somehow gotten lost on the equally crowded boardwalk, and he winds up threatened with arrest over a petty misunderstanding. Coming to the rescue at the police station, Joe’s rough brand of heroism emerges when he demonstrates that he knows what citizens’ rights are and is indifferent to police belligerence, telling them, “Look, you can’t hold people here unless there’s a charge preferred against them!” This results in the cops threatening to arrest the whole group on manifestly trumped-up charges. Merrick, terrified of the prospect of going to jail now that no one recognizes him as a wealthy man of influence, begs him to stop, but Joe’s relentlessness is his great strength: “No matter how small the right is you try to take away from me, I’ll fight for it. The Boston Tea Party was started over one penny!”

As mild as this might seem in terms of leftist cinema, The Devil and Miss Jones was a popular mainstream film. For all its casual humor, it has large ambitions to reconceive the way Americans regard the meaning of their country. The film celebrates the teeming masses of New York City and a vision of America’s history centered on the well-being of ordinary citizens that could foster the fight for rights in the daily scrum of working-class life.

In 1941, a clearly left-leaning project like The Devil and Miss Jones nevertheless had an outspoken conservative Republican lead actor in Cummings and an ultraright director, Sam Wood, who became a vicious, blacklist-supporting scourge of the postwar years. Wood served as founder and president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, an organization that urged the government to investigate the traitorous communist infiltration of the film industry. Other prominent members of the group included Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Ayn Rand, and Walt Disney — as well as Charles Coburn. Later, Coburn joined the White Citizens’ Councils, a network of white supremacist groups organized to oppose black voting rights and the desegregation of schools. Yet in 1941, Cummings, Wood, and Coburn were part of the mix with left-leaning talent like Jean Arthur, producer Frank Ross, and screenwriter Norman Krasna.

There was a hopeful strain of popular filmmaking in the 1930s and early ’40s that tended toward an admiring view of the American working class as tough, smart, and ready to fight the powers that be, even if there was a conservative inclination to show a hands-across-the-class-divide reconciliation in the end. The Devil and Miss Jones beautifully represents this pro-worker road not taken in American commercial film.